Blue Sandelwood Soap - Loring Park Love-In's 1967-68 (1996)

From the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, Blue Sandlewood Soap was one of relatively few '60s psychedelic groups from the region (though there were others, such as C.A. Quintet and, on some of their records, the Litter and T.C. Atlantic). They issued just one single, "Friends I Haven't Yet Met"/"Love !pirT" (sic), though that 45, plus a good deal of unreleased material from the time, appears on the CD Loring Park Love-Ins. Take the amateurish '60s garage rock that's filled up many a Pebbles-type compilation and add a good deal of acid-inspired lyrics, constant tempo changes, and odd fragmented song structures and you get Blue Sandlewood Soap. Like their name, it's an awkward mixture of ingredients, instrumentally dominated by Harley Toberman's Farfisa organ and some pretty clumsy drug flash journal lyrics. There aren't a bucketful of reissues of bands playing psychedelic music in such a garage-ish fashion, as there are innumerable reissues of bands playing the basic teen punk so common to garage bands of just a year or two earlier. That doesn't make it a notable record or Blue Sandlewood Soap a notable, imaginative group, though. AMG.

listen here

Buy @ Amazon: USA - FR

Broken Glass - Broken Glass 1975

Broken Glass can be considered a side project for several known blues musicians, featuring Stan Webb's Chicken Shack with friends Robbie Blunt from Bronco, Rob Rawlinson who after played with Ian Hunter, Mac Poole from Warhorse and Miller Anderson from Savoy Brown, Mott the Hoople among others. An interesting album.

listen here

Buy @ Amazon: USA - FR - UK

Horace Silver - The Jody Grind 1966

Following the subtly modern bent of much of The Cape Verdean Blues, Horace Silver recommitted himself to his trademark "funky jazz" sound on The Jody Grind. Yet he also consciously chose to keep a superbly advanced front line, with players like trumpeter Woody Shaw (retained from the Cape Verdean session), altoist/flutist James Spaulding, and tenor saxophonist Tyrone Washington. Thus, of all Silver's groove-centered records, The Jody Grind winds up as possibly the most challenging. It's also one of the most underappreciated; Silver's piano playing is at its rhythmic, funky best throughout, brimming over with confidence and good cheer, and evoking memories of the classic feel of his early-'60s quintet. His compositions have a similarly bright overtone, which (as the liner notes allude to) was becoming increasingly rare in mid-'60s jazz as the fury of the avant-garde and the Civil Rights upheaval began to seep into jazz's wider consciousness. The title cut is a playful, overlooked classic on the funky side of hard bop; Silver kicks it with a tasty groove, giving the rest of the musicians plenty to play off of. The whole group absolutely burns through "Grease Piece," a terrific hard swinger full of smoking solo statements from just about everyone on down to drum whiz Roger Humphries. Really, the whole album is packed with great grooves and tight solos, epitomizing the best virtues of Silver's music. For those who have digested classics like Song for My Father, Blowin' the Blues Away, and Finger Poppin', The Jody Grind is one of the best places to go next. AMG.

listen here

Buy @ Amazon: USA - FR - UK

Children - Rebirth 1968

The first half of Rebirth is a rather phenomenal document: mood-driven and densely textured psychedelia at its very best. "Daybreak" opens the album with what seems to be a fairly quaint ditty until its controlled eruptions of orchestration, unique and enticing, cause the music to grow in dimension. "Maypole" also initially leans toward preciousness, the themes of childhood naïveté employed by dozens of bands in the wake of Sgt. Pepper's, but in its seesawing-calliope backing and minor-key shifts there is also something compellingly creepy that resonates more of shadows than innocence. It leads wonderfully into "Don't Ever Lose It," a macabre fairy tale as enigmatically disorienting as it is rocking, and the delicate "Beautiful," which (particularly owing to Stephen Perron's haunting vocals) lives up to its title in the spookiest of ways. "Sitting on a Flower," a Cassell Webbshowcase, is also powerful stuff. The album's only significant failing is a tendency during its last half to lose sight of the experience it means to convey. The honky tonk parody "Military School" (which is quite interesting musically) may be a timely parable of the imbroglio in Vietnam, but it feels like an alien presence on the album, as does the goofy "I Got Involved," more akin to a 1930s radio commercial. The album rights itself nicely with "Pictorial," an epic, enveloping piece of acid dementia, and the equally fierce "Dreaming Slave," with its funky bursts of vibey jazz. Regardless of its flaws, Rebirthproves the Children to be one of the finest and most fascinating forgotten bands of the era. AMG.

listen here

Buy @ Amazon: USA - FR - UK

Harvey Mandel, Charlie Musselwhite & Barry Goldberg - Blues From Chicago 1976

An encounter by three top blues musicians of the era, Harvey Mandel from Canned Heat, Barry Goldberg from Paul Butterfield Blues Band with Charlie Musselwhite from Charlie Musselwhite's South Side Band. An album not to miss with plenty of deep blues from Chicago.

listen here

Buy @ Amazon: USA

The Leathercoated Minds - A Trip Down The Sunset Strip 1968

While the Leathercoated Minds is an inarguably superb name for a rock & roll band, the sad truth is it didn't really belong to a group at all. Producer and entrepreneur Snuff Garrett wanted to put together an album designed to give clueless, would-be hipsters an idea of what a night on Hollywood's fabled Sunset Strip was like; he'd already chosen a snazzy cover photo, and needed some session cats to throw together a half-hour of music to go along with it. Garrett hired a then little-known musician named J.J. Cale to produce the album and play lead guitar, and Cale's fleet but laid-back picking is all over this album. Cale overdubs a handful of Roger McGuinn-style lead lines all over "Eight Miles High" and "Mr. Tambourine Man," he throws some twang-centric psychedelia into "Over Under Sideways Down" and "Sunshine Superman," and contributes some enjoyable original throwaways with titles like "Sunset and Clark" and "Pot Luck." Cale and his studio partners (no one's sure just who they are besides Roger Tillison on vocals, though Cale's buddy Leon Russell is probably playing keyboards) probably tossed this off in a couple afternoons, but it sounds like they were having a good time doing it, and the picking is uniformly fine while the arrangements are a shade more imaginative than one might expect for a quickie knock-off album like this. Anyone expecting A Trip Down the Sunset Strip to be some sort of lost masterwork is only fooling themselves, but it's a fun listen with plenty of crackerjack guitar work, and it has the good sense to wrap up its business in less than 30 minutes; those with an interest in either Cale or pop culture of the period will want to give it a spin. AMG.

listen here

Buy @ Amaazon: USA - FR - UK

Gregg Allman - Laid Back 1973

Recorded in the same year as the Brothers and Sisters album, this solo debut release is a beautiful amalgam of R&B, folk, and gospel sounds, with the best singing on any of Gregg Allman's solo releases. He covers his own "Midnight Rider" in a more mournful, dirge-like manner, and Jackson Browne's "These Days" gets its most touching and tragic-sounding rendition as well. Although Chuck Leavell and Jaimoe are here, there's very little that sounds like the Allman Brothers Band -- prominent guitars, apart from a few licks by Tommy Talton (Cowboy, ex-We the People), are overlooked in favor of gospel-tinged organ and choruses behind Allman's soulful singing. AMG.

listen here

Buy @ Amazon: USA - FR - UK

Don Ellis - Live at Monterey! 1966

The first effort by the Don Ellis big band, as with all of his other orchestral projects, has yet to be reissued on CD. One of the most exciting new jazz big bands of the period, Ellis' ensemble became notorious for its ability to play coherently in odd time signatures. One of the four originals heard on this acclaimed outing from the 1966 Monterey Jazz Festival is titled "33 222 1 222" to show how the band manages to perform in 19/4 time. The other selections are Hank Levy's "Passacaglia And Fugue," "Concerto For Trumpet" (in 5/4) and "New Nine." In addition to the time signatures, Ellis enjoyed utilizing unusual combinations of instruments; the instrumentation on this date consists of five trumpets, three trombones, five saxes, piano, three bassists, two drummers and a percussionist. Among the more notable sidemen are a young Tom Scott (who solos on alto) and tenor-saxophonistIra Schulman. Highly recommended but unfortunately this album will be difficult to find. AMG.

listen here

Buy @ Amazon: USA - FR - UK

Cressida - Asylum 1971

More highly melodic progressive rock, this time built around longer songs and extended instrumental passages -- among the latter, "Munich," which was alternately titled "Munich 1938: Appeasement Was the Cry; Munich 1970: Mine to Do or Die," was surprisingly accessible at nine minutes and change, built on Peter Jennings' extended organ cadenzas embellished with John Culley's crisp electric guitar flourishes, all wrapped around a pleasing array of melodies that easily carry the song's length. The three extended numbers that comprised the original LP's side two also make for fascinating listening,Angus Cullen's McCartneyesque vocals calling to mind the Moody Blues in their prime, while the band's hard, at times slightly jazzy, instrumental attack evokes echoes of Caravan with, perhaps, a touch of the most energetic of Deep Purple's Jon Lord-spawned classical experiments. The group's downfall may have been their reliance on virtuosity, as opposed to raw wattage and brute force in their attack -- with Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Keith Emerson was bringing crowds of 20,000 teenagers at a time to their feet by abusing his organ, while as part of Cressida, Peter Jennings on "Let Them Come When They Will" plays the kind of break that would have wowed them in a club in front of maybe 200 people (while Cullen's singing takes on a resemblance to Jim Morrison in the middle of the track). It's all sort of the difference between relating to one's music and audience on a retail basis, as opposed to wholesale -- Cressida never got past the former, and it makes Asylum a very pleasing album but also a very demanding one. AMG. Thanks to ChrisGoesRock.

listen here

Buy @ Amazon: USA - FR - UK

Barney Wilen And His Amazing Free Rock Band - Dear Prof. Leary 1968

Barney Wilen's mother was French, his father a successful American dentist-turned-inventor. He grew up mostly on the French Riviera; the family left during World War II but returned upon its conclusion. According to Wilen himself, he was convinced to become a musician by his mother's friend, the poet Blaise Cendrars. As a teenager he started a youth jazz club in Nice, where he played often. He moved to Paris in the mid-'50s and worked with such American musicians as Bud Powell, Benny Golson,Miles Davis, and J.J. Johnson at the Club St. Germain. His emerging reputation received a boost in 1957 when he played with Davis on the soundtrack to the Louis Malle film Lift to the Scaffold. Two years later, he performed with Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk on the soundtrack to Roger Vadim's Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1960). Wilen began working in a rock-influenced style during the '60s, recording an album entitled Dear Prof. Leary in 1968. In the early '70s, Wilen led a failed expedition of filmmakers, musicians, and journalists to travel to Africa to document pygmy music. Later Wilenplayed in a punk rock band called Moko and founded a French Jazzmobile-type organization that took music to people living in outlying areas. He also worked in theater. By the mid-'90s, he was working once again in a bebop vein in a band with the pianist Laurent de Wilde. Much of Wilen's later work was documented on the Japanese Venus label. AMG.

listen here

Buy @ Amazon: USA - FR - UK

Carlos Santana & Buddy Miles - Live! 1972

From December 1971 to April 1972, Carlos Santana and several other members of Santana toured with drummer/vocalist Buddy Miles, a former member of the Electric Flag and Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsys. The resulting live album contained both Santana hits ("Evil Ways") and Buddy Miles hits ("Changes"), plus a 25-minute, side-long jam titled "Free Form Funkafide Filth." It was not, perhaps, the live album Santana fans had been waiting for, but at this point in its career, the band could do no wrong. The album went into the Top Ten and sold a million copies. AMG.

listen here

Buy @ Amazon: USA - FR - UK

Troyka - Troyka 1970

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time when some mighty odd, uncommercial, half-baked records emerged on big labels. One of them was Troyka's little-heard, self-titled 1970 LP for Cotillion, which mixes raw blues-rock with strange mixtures of psychedelia and middle eastern tunes and tempos. It sounded a little like a low-rent Mothers of Invention, though it wasn't easy to tell if the musicians were entirely serious about their weirdness, or if this was something of a quickly thrown-together exploitation of the stranger aspects of the psychedelic underground. AMG.

listen here

Buy @ Amazon: USA - FR - UK

Jesse Harper - Guitar Absolution In The Shade Of A Midnight Sun 1969

During the mid sixties in New Zealand, the leading bands all included strong lead guitarists. Human Instinct had Billy TK, Ticket had Eddie Hansen, the Underdogs had Harvey Mann and the Brew had Doug Jerebine (aka Jesse Harper). Harvey Mann had learned much of his technique and style from Doug Jerebine. The Underdogs and Human Instinct were good competition for each other, both fighting for the ultimate cult following.
The 'Brew' were regarded as New Zealand’s first “Underground” band. It was put together by Californian Bob Gillet who was a jazz musician living in New Zealand. He had decided to form his own band to play a new kind of music. His first recruit was guitarist Doug Jerebine (pictured far left in the B&W photo below) who was fond of experimenting with equipment and sounds. Doug was a guitar wizard and had previously played with the 'Embers'. They only produced one bizarre / experimental single called "Bengal Tiger" in 1967,with a distinctive eastern influenced guitar before splitting and going onto other musical endeavours.
When the Brew folded, Doug went to England and began writing and recording under the name Jesse Harper and made a powerful LP 'Guitar Absolution in the Shade of a Midnight Sun'.
When the Human Instinct made a brief visit to England, they met up with Jesse and he provided them with a number of his songs. In fact seven of the songs on the Human Instinct's first two albums were written by Jesse.
While in England, Jesse Harper recorded an album full of original material, and this music was finally released in 1992 by Kissing Spell. This is a limited edition of 1000 copies vinyl - acetete only MONO recording from 1969 by one of those Hendrixians from NZL - first time available in restored sound quality. A re-mastered version has also been made available by Kissing Spell in 2002 which featured extensive liner notes but replaced the cover art as shown below.
.
While the tracks on the album are titled differently to the Kissing Spell release Guitar Absolution in the Shadow of a Midnight Sun, they are in fact the same songs. The cover image is "The Agony In The Garden, Studio Of El Greco, 16th Century" and the music has been described as being 'Killer Acid Psych 60s Rock Guitar Fuzz Trips'.
The ten demos, which make up this album, were recorded live with a drummer and had bass, lead parts, and vocals overdubbed by Harper. It was literally a one-man project. And like the Bevis Frond, who followed a similar pathway later, the music is mainly super heavy, washed in phasing with multi-tracked guitar leads battling for attention. The Hendrix approach was very clear. It's all noisy and druggy, with the occasional mellower moment creeping in. Perfect for fans of late-'60s fuzzed-out hard rock. Yet another discovery from the ever widening crevice of obscurities from the psychedelic era.
While in England, Harper played bass with Jeff Beck, recorded an album that would become a underground classic and formed the World Band with another Kiwi Mike Donnelly on drums.
They played London, toured Holland and turned down a recording deal with EMI.
Harper quit the music scene to join the Hare Krishna movement but not before leaving a musical legacy that New Zealand's Human Instinct turned into a piece of underground history.
For more information on Doug, check out Keith Newmans excellent Doug Jerebine story.
.
.
The first time I heard this album, I was completely blown away by two tracks - "Jug-a-Jug Song" and "Midnight Sun". Both tracks have a real Hendrix feel about them, and have been covered by Human Instinct on their classic LP 'Stoned Guitar'. In comparison, I gotta say that Harper's original take of these two tracks are far superior. Harper was renowned by his peers in the 1960’s as an “out there” guitar player with the playing ability to rival Hendrix. To read more about this interesting parody, have a look at this article from fishriderrecords
The remaining tracks are not quite so psychedelic and his playing style and vocals for me are somewhat reminiscent of Ten Years Afters' guitarist 'Alvin Lee'.
Overall, this album is a lost KIWI gem from the late 60's and is well worth the listen.
Thanks to Dr Bell Otus Aka "Las Galletas de Maria".

listen here

Buy @ Amazon: USA - FR - UK

Robert Lamm - Skinny Boy 1974

At the time of the release of Robert Lamm's debut solo album, Skinny Boy, in 1974, it was easy to think that the singer/songwriter/pianist intended to launch a solo career, even though no announcement was ever made that he was leaving Chicago. The group was at the peak of its popularity at the time, having recently released the third of five consecutive number one albums,Chicago VII. But Lamm, who had written most of its early hits -- "25 or 6 to 4," "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?," "Beginnings," "Saturday in the Park" -- was facing increasing competition from other writers in the band. And Skinny Boy, though its title song (also the album's single) had appeared on Chicago VII, was a departure from the group's sound, especially in that it entirely eschewed the use of a horn section (though Chicago guitarist Terry Kath was all over it). The music was identifiablyLamm's in its mixture of Beatles-style pop/rock with elements of Latin, funk, and gospel, all cued to his percussive piano playing. The lyrics were full of distress: the word "crazy" appeared in four songs, including two titles, "Crazy Way to Spend a Year" and "Crazy Brother John," and "insane" appeared in one. Lamm's voice often sounded strained, which contributed to the sense of a tormented soul but didn't do much for the album's commercial potential. But there also seems to have been little or no promotion (which is not surprising, since the album originally came out on Chicago's label, Columbia, which had little incentive to foment insurrection in its most successful group), and Skinny Boy quickly disappeared. AMG.

listen here

Buy @ Amazon: USA - FR - UK